About Little Facebook Editor

Here's a little app, an editor for a single Facebook post. It's mainly for discussion. I'm interested in knowing what people think.

How to

Sign on Facebook using the Sign on button in the upper left corner.

Click the New button to start a new post. Click OK to confirm.

Enter some text into the text area. When you're ready, click the Save button.

The Go button is now enabled. Click it to open a new tab with the contents of your post, in Facebook.

When you want to add or change the text, edit it in the text area and click Update. You can do this as many times as you like for as long as you like.

When you want to start a new post, click the New button.

What it's useful for

Live-blogging.

Editing articles in a more professional feature-full way.

Using Facebook for writing and maintaining docs.

If you have ideas, please post a comment, below.

Where we can go with this

Cross-posting Facebook content to a blog, an RSS feed, other places that might pop up. (Note that it now becomes easier for new "places to pop up" because the content doesn't have to reside there exclusively. )

To encourage other content systems to have easy APIs for cross-posting.

Of course I want to hook an outliner up to this, to manage a library of Facebook posts. This is something I imagine a serious writer would use to compose content for Facebook. It very likely will get me writing in Facebook, seriously.

It's a strategic capability

People have said, many times, that Facebook wants to lock your content in its silo. The existence of this feature says otherwise. And it doesn't make sense that they would care whether your writing has a dual existence outside of Facebook. If anything, it means more real writing shows up in Facebook, and that seems like a good thing for everyone, including Facebook. As I see it, a win-win.

It's often surprisingly difficult to get vendors to provide an API that allows people to compose content outside of their environment. In other environments, for example WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, and other blogging systems, APIs have always been part of the culture (a good thing). Now that we know how to do this with Facebook, we have a strong participant in the web, open in exactly the way we want all the others to be.